Having spent a lot of time in the Perl world and even trying to write a Perl poem here and there, I decided to give some Python poetry a try. It turned out to be a bit more philosophical than poetic. But it compiles and that’s what counts; even though it doesn’t do anything useful (or anything at all).Read the rest of this entry »

I have been writing a lot of code that has been interacting with MySQL lately. Sometimes I find it easier to work the result set in a dictionary form and other times it is easier with an array. But in order to not break all your code, it is necessary to set a default cursor class that keeps your code consistent. More often than not, I find using using a arrays is easier since I just want quick access to all the retrieved data. I also end up making my SELECT calls while specifying the columns and order of the columns I want returned.

The reason that using cursor classes is handy is because Python doesn’t come with a mysql_fetch_assoc like PHP or selectrow_hashref like Perl’s DBI interface. Python uses cursor dictionaries to bridge this gap. Ultimately your result is the same. But as with Perl and PHP, defaulting to cursor dictionaries isn’t a good idea for larger datasets because of the extra processing time and memory required to convert the data.Read the rest of this entry »

There really isn’t a solid Python module for multiprocessing and MySQL. Now this may be because MySQL on a single server is disk bound and therefore limited in speed or just because no one has written it. So here is a quick and dirty example using the Pool module in multiprocessing in Python 2.6 and MySQLdb.

I also tried using PySQLPool. This was designed for threading and not forking as I am doing with Pool method. Although I am sure it is possible to use PySQLPool with forking by passing the connection (pool) object down to the child process or possibly doing something with IPC, I decided to keep it simple (although slightly more expensive) and instantiate MySQLdb connections upon fork.Read the rest of this entry »